Eddie Honda felt his breathing quicken and tears come to his eyes as he walked through the Ridgewood High School parking lot one recent Sunday and heard the familiar strains of the Chicago Royal Airs Drum Corps.
The sound took the 52-year-old Honda back more than 30 years to his Near Northwest Side neighborhood of poor Italian, Polish, Irish and Jewish families and a charismatic man named Sie Lurye, who somehow believed he could make a big difference in kids’ lives by teaching them how to blow horns, beat drums, wave flags and twirl rifles.
Honda, now an engineer who lives with his family in Lincoln Park, was among the last of the old members to find out about a recent reunion and a revival of the corps, and he showed up to watch. It has been 35 years since the Royal Airs disbanded, but Honda still hears the music “just pop into my head” at work.
Drum and bugle corps had their heyday in the postwar years of the 1950s and early ’60s, when 700 junior teams competed in the U.S., a dozen of them in and around Chicago. Eventually, financial support from the American Legion and other veterans groups waned, and only 70 teams remain active nationwide. Though Sie (short for Simon) Lurye formed the Royal Airs in 1958 mainly to get kids off the streets and away from trouble, he also was determined to make them the best junior drum corps in Chicago and one of the best in the nation.
Despite having no musical know-how–his recreational background was boxing–the WWII Army Air Force vet found talented teachers to turn the kids into musicians, convincing the nationally known Truman Crawford to lend his talents as an arranger of marches, concocting schemes to pay for all of it, and spending the rest of his time being a father figure to the legions of kids from Humboldt Park–and later from Old Town and even some suburbs–who joined the Royal Airs.
Lurye, who owned a number of parking lots in the Loop and served as a precinct captain in the 1st Ward, had a personality even stronger than his political connection to Mayor Richard J. Daley. The Royal Airs alumni describe him as Machiavellian, domineering, combustible–and caring.
Bob Doran, 56, of McHenry, sums up Lurye’s leadership style with a story: “One day during brass rehearsal . . . and still during my first month as a Royal Air, Sie called me aside and said: ‘Bob, you are the new horn sergeant.’ My reply was a huge mistake. I said: ‘Sie, I am the new guy. . . . There are others who have been here longer who deserve it more. So, no thanks.’ Sie looked at me sternly and said, as he cracked me firmly but affectionately across my face, ‘I didn’t ask you; I told you. You are the oldest kid and the young ones really respect you. Yer duh sergeant.’ Then he hugged me and cried.”
“He could make your palms sweat,” says another Royal Air, Serge Uccetta, 57, of Inverness. “But he loved you.”
Doran came to the Royal Airs after marching in the McHenry Viscounts Drum Corps where, he says, the staff “loved the kids but had no desire to grow toward a championship.” Lurye, on the other hand, demanded that his corps be a winner. “When I visited my first Royal Air rehearsal to decide if I would join, I reeled at the pure electricity that filled the building,” Doran remembers.
Under Lurye, the Royal Airs won dozens of drum corps competitions, many at the national level, played for two U.S. presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) and established their place as one of the greatest team in an era that was the highpoint of the drum-corps movement.
Along the way, Lurye put some 800 boys and girls through an experience that many of them credit with saving them from the troubles that befell other kids in the neighborhood. “Three of the kids I hung around with would, before they were 18 years old, murder a man for his money so that they could buy ‘goof balls,’ the drug of that day,” says Royal Airs member Chris Ferrara. “Another would be found dead on the steps of the police station of an overdose.”
Almost all of the Royal Airs eventually left Humboldt Park and went on to successful careers–their numbers include a doctor, an airline pilot, a vet, playwright and banker–but many of them still consider their marching days as a peak experience.
“Being a part of the Royal Airs has truly been the best part of my life,” says 46-year-old Barbara Stoffel, a banking executive in McHenry, Ill., who is part of the reunited group. “I’ve had broken and jammed fingers, sore neck and shoulder . . . . Was it worth it? Absolutely!”
Eventually, Lurye’s ambition for the Royal Airs outstripped his ability to generate funding for their tours. He sold all his parking lots to pay for the team buses, occasional charter airplanes and many other expenses the kids and their parents couldn’t afford. The group gave its last performance in 1968, and Lurye retired to Phoenix two years later, nearly penniless and somewhat heartbroken. He died in 1987 at 72.
Last year he was chosen to be inducted posthumously into the Drum Corps International Hall of Fame. Several of the old Royal Airs approached his daughter, Jackie Lurye Borrelli, to suggest an alumni corps be organized to play at the ceremony. She remembers laughing. “What do you think you’ll be able to do?” she asked. A group got together, rehearsed for a day, then played for Borrelli. She couldn’t believe how good they sounded. “All I could do was cry,” she says.
Since their first reunion two summers ago, these boys and girls–all now in their 50s and 60s and spread out over 12 states and Canada–have been touring the country together as they did during the 1960s. They pay their own way to places like Scranton, Pa. and Milwaukee and practice an average of four days a week during the season. They wear exact reproductions of the white and blue uniforms they wore all those decades ago, and they perform their precision routines for roaring crowds of nostalgic baby boomers.
At the end of a recent long day of practice and performance the 150-odd corps members crowded into a nearby pub, leaving regular customers gaping at the strange middle-aged love fest. “We’re big huggers,” says Carm LoGalbo, an original Royal Air and now vice president of marketing for the 2003 group. “We’re big kissers too.”
The Royal Airs are not in great shape physically, even considering that their average age is around 55. Mary Ann Huseth, the busy “corps nurse,” says 45 of the current Royal Airs have diabetes, several have cardiac stents and one has an artificial leg. Once, when the corps marched off the field during a rehearsal, one baritone bugle player was left behind–passed out on his back in the grass. (He was quickly revived and performed that evening.)
But many of the members relate the reunion experience with miraculous drops in blood pressure, increases in vitality and wholesale changes in personality. Robert Reyes, a 48-year-old electrical foreman for the City of Chicago, was embarrassed when he showed up at the reunion weighing 487 lbs. He wanted desperately to play his horn, but couldn’t fit into a uniform. So he underwent gastro-bypass surgery and he’s now down to 235 pounds and ready to play next year.
If there is a next year. As in 1968, willing marchers aren’t enough to keep a corps together. Leadership and money are two other necessary ingredients.
All the travel has taken a financial toll on many of the members; some have maxed out their credit cards and dipped into their families’ savings. Marketing chief LoGalbo is trying to find a corporate sponsor, but the prospects are not bright.
Moreover, musical director John Zimny hints he may not be back next year if corps leaders don’t make a commitment to improve musically. It’s not that they’re still competing; they typically march as an exhibition at the end of modern competitions. And they perform at a remarkably high level considering their age and rehearsal time. But, like Truman Crawford before him, Zimny wants to do what the Royal Airs have always done: strive for perfection.
If they manage to stay together, the group hopes to perform at a prominent venue in Chicago next year, setting their sights on playing at halftime at a Bears game in Soldier Field, as they did 40 years ago at Wrigley Field. Meanwhile, LoGalbo is lobbying the city’s Cultural Affairs Department for financial support and other venue possibilities.
Beyond that, the reunited members would like to find a way to use the Royal Airs to help give today’s kids the sense of discipline, teamwork and drive that Sie Lurye gave hundreds of kids in Humboldt Park.
If all that sounds too ambitious for a group of middle-aged Chicagoans, it’s because you don’t know who the corps director is. Jackie Lurye Borrelli now runs the Royal Airs with a rough approximation of her father’s mushy heart and iron will.
“We dislike the word, ‘No,’ ” she says with a wink. n
